Category: UW Experts in the News

The EPA’s proposed limit amounts to one drop of water in twenty Olympic-size swimming pools, said Christy Remucal, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Wisconsin.

Nick Buttrick, a psychologist at University of Wisconsin-Madison, wanted to know whether firearms provided similar comfort to gun owners, serving as a sort of psychological security blanket.

But plenty of America’s infrastructure was laid down even earlier, meaning it was designed to specifications that are probably even more obsolete, said Daniel B. Wright, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Matthew Hora, founding director of the Center for Research on College-Workforce Transitions at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said that he “wholeheartedly” endorses a ban on unpaid internships and associated training programs, but he isn’t optimistic that they are going away anytime soon. Some disciplines, like social work, make them mandatory for graduation; employers in some fields, such as the arts, have limited resources; and others, he said, pointing to government, seem to “ignore the unethical nature of free labor.

To put this practice into context, I spoke to two experts: Langston Wilkins, expert in hip-hop and assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and Dan Charnas, historian of hip-hop and associate arts professor at New York University. Both confirmed that the use of repetition to add musicality to spoken vocal samples is a common practice in hip-hop, but neither was familiar with Deutsch’s framing of the phenomenon as an auditory illusion.

Humankind has long sought crowd-sourced answers to problems. From the 300-year history of the advice column to the plethora of advisers at our employ — spiritual, political, financial, emotional, professional, legal — people are inclined to make better choices when those actions have been guided by another. “We all have biases,” says Lyn Van Swol, a professor of communication science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, “and if you can meld your perspective with another good source of information, you’re starting to cancel out some of your biases.”

“There are researchers out there who, rightfully so, want really strong data. We all should be striving for very strong evidence, but it’s very hard to come by in environmental exposure cases like this,” said neuroscientist Julie Stamm, a clinical assistant professor in the Department of Kinesiology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who was not involved in the consensus statement. She agreed that cohort studies will yield the best evidence regarding CTE, “but that’s going to take decades,” she said.

Lyric Bartholomay, a professor in the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies integrated pest management and public health entomology who was not part of the study, said “increasingly tailored genetic approaches” will be necessary in the future to protect crops and people from pests, especially as insecticide resistance increases.

“This is the first time I’ve ever experienced drug rationing in my career,” said Marina Sharifi, medical oncologist at the University of Wisconsin’s Carbone Cancer Center.

An MCS is a prolific lightning generator. A late-April 2014 MCS along the Gulf Coast produced 6,076 cloud-to-ground lightning strikes in just 15 minutes, according to the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s CIMSS Satellite blog.

It’s hard to say, says Bilge Mutlu, a professor of computer science at the University of Wisconsin Madison. While the researchers expect that with repeated exposure, the uncanny valley reaction might diminish, Mutlu says that for him, the feeling has only gotten stronger.

Dietram Scheufele, faculty researcher and chair in the Department of Life Sciences Communication at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, has spent decades studying the ways in which the public responds to new technologies.

In many states, there’s either political pressure to keep tuition low or flat, or there are mandates, said Nick Hillman, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Education. For example, he said Wisconsin temporarily kept tuition frozen for nearly a decade.

Rhinovirus C, one of the most common cold-causing viruses, can lead to bacterial pneumonia in children who have or are susceptible to asthma, said Ann Palmenberg, a researcher and professor with the Institute for Molecular Virology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“I think today we have more conversations about minimizing harm, and I think that’s a good thing,” said Kathleen Culver, director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The original pause to student loan payments originated from the early days of the pandemic, according to University of Wisconsin Madison professor Nick Hillman.

Mauk, a former Standards and Practices executive at Fox, says she spoke with Mary Huelsbeck, the archivist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (where Mauk completed her doctoral program) out of a desire to “prove that this is not the first time someone had spoken out and used their platform as a late-night television talk show host to do good political activation.” (Mauk’s husband, producer Hayden Mauk, used to work with Jimmy Kimmel.)

The original pause to student loan payments originated from the early days of the pandemic, according to University of Wisconsin Madison professor Nick Hillman.

The only way Trump could lose his right to run would be if the Senate had convicted him in one of the impeachment trials and also voted to declare him ineligible under language in Article I, section 3 of the Constitution or some formal congressional process under section 3 of the 14th Amendment, according to Kenneth Mayer, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Professor Joanne Cantor of the University of Wisconsin has spent years studying the lasting impact that scary films can have on us. In an interview with BBC Science Focus, she explained how horror films trigger the part of the brain known as the amygdala, which is highly active in situations where we are afraid.

“These bills are all bound to fail because they try to slice off one aspect of it and regulate it,” said Dietram Scheufele, a communications professor at the University of Wisconsin. “Ultimately, of course every time they try to do that, they end up into running into the reality that players like Google, players like Meta and OpenAI and Bard being part of Alphabet will not be any different.